About Our Guest

Doug Ford is an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, Va., and the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the Law School. He is coordinator of the Legal Aid Pro Bono Immigration Project, a partnership with the law firm Hunton & Williams and the Law School’s Mortimer Caplin Public Service Center.

Ford has previously worked as a policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in Washington, D.C. He has also worked as a senior research associate and deputy director of Bosnia Projects with Physicians for Human Rights.

Program Transcript

Jan Paynter: Hello. I’m Jan Paynter and I would like to welcome you again to our program, Politics Matters. We now begin the conclusion of our two part series on immigration and our guest today is Professor Douglas Ford. Professor Ford is Lecturer General Faculty and Director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the Law School of the University of Virginia. Douglas Ford received an AB from Bowdoin College in ’83 and a JD from Northeastern University School of Law in 1996. Professor Ford is an immigration attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He’s also coordinator of the Legal Aid Pro Bono Immigration Project in partnership with the law firm of Hunton and Williams and the Law School’s Mortimer Caplin Public Service Center. He has also worked as a policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in Washington, DC, having served as well as Senior Research Associate and Deputy Director of the Bosnia Projects with Physicians for Human Rights. He is the co-editor of Human Rights Advocacy Stories along with Deena R. Hurwitz and Margaret L. Satterthwaite in 2009. In his thought provoking book Americans in Waiting: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, Hiroshi Motomura explores the idea of whether we can be a nation of immigrants and still be one nation. Eventers, the quintessentially American hope that through immigration we may come to experience a deeper sense of belonging and thus participate in all areas of American life, be they social, political, economic, moving forward with a respect for all individuals. In Part 2 of our series on immigration, we now consider this idea through the lens of our particular community of Charlottesville, Virginia, and our response to the far flung travelers and adventurers who seek to join our community. Welcome, Professor Ford.

Doug Ford: Thanks for the invite.

Jan Paynter: I asked your colleague in the previous program last time what brought you to the field of immigration law, the Pro Bono Immigration Project and human rights work in particular.

Doug Ford: Well, my introduction may be a bit more prosaic from a simple youthful love of travel and I remember getting to do a Boy Scout trip when I was in high school and getting to go cross country and then my family took a cross country trip and then I drove cross country when I graduated from undergrad and just seeing the difference in our own country and understanding cultural difference across the United States was something that just fascinated me and I loved it. And from there ended up taking a real intriguing trip where I basically rode a bicycle across much of Africa and the way people who had nothing to do with me, knew nothing about me looked at me as the most bizarre creature that could have ridden into their town square, how well they treated me just on a human level, just created such a wonderful sense of common humanity and kind of left me eternally an optimist about the way people can be. Such that basic ideas like human rights where human is the modifier as opposed to citizen or even some of the ways we think of our constitutional rights, it’s our common humanity that gives us some of these basic claims on a level of treatment from each other and from governments. And that just kind of has continued to inform my work. I was lucky enough to work with Physicians for Human Rights in the Balkans after the wars there and saw great tragedy but also saw the resilience of folks and how difficult it was but how people had to overcome great abuse and how they had to figure out how to live with one another and in fact can, although it’s very difficult. And so I also through Physicians for Human Rights and U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants got to work on this side of it and how people come to the United States and resources and things that can be done to help them. So that’s how I ended up in kind of immigration and human rights.

Jan Paynter: That’s very interesting. Having discussed in our first segment the history of U.S. immigration law and policy as well as the particularized requirements for immigrants who seek entry, who comes, Professor, to the Charlottesville community and what specific challenges do they encounter upon arrival based on your experiences?

Doug Ford: Maybe—one of the things in thinking about this type of question is to give a little just data on our overall national situation and then localize it. Foreign born is the data point that’s used in talking about immigrants because some foreign born become citizens so in fact it’s not, ‘our citizens include foreign born’ but the foreign born are approximately 38 million or around 13 percent of our population of 300 million. 50 plus percent are Latino, 25 plus are Asian. In Virginia we have a population of almost eight million and approximately 10 percent or 800,000 are foreign born. And here in Charlottesville, Albemarle, I’m a little uncertain of exactly how the latest census data are playing out but I think it’s around 10,000 or 11,000, roughly seven to eight percent of our population of as I understand it roughly 145,000, talking about Charlottesville and Albemarle. And here likewise the largest group are Latinos but a significant group of Asians. And here we have probably a more diverse mix outside of the northern Virginia suburbs because of the university. I mean, as with much of the state, we’re seeing a rise in immigration, a lot of that is Latino for some of the different lower income type of work. But we’re also seeing—I mean, there was just an article in The Post the other day about the rise in Asian immigration in the northern Virginia suburbs but I think it’s true in much of the rest of Virginia as well. And then we have the particular distinction of the university and all the research and—researchers and faculty, academics, students that come as well as, for a small town, a pretty large refugee resettlement program through the International Rescue Committee, one of the kind of legendary immigration and refugee agencies in the country and they are part of the federally mandated and funded refugee program that I believe colleague Professor Martin briefly eluded to. And they are part of a system nationally that bring refugees and they have been all sorts of folks in the last, I believe the program was set up in the mid 90s, in the last 10, 15 years. People from the Balkans, Bosnians and others, people from Africa, Somali Bantu, people from the Thai Burmese border, Burmese Karen ethnic group, another ethnic group so there’s a large diversity. And the university, for instance, is a known center for Tibetan studies so we have a significant Tibetan population here that it’s kind of like, why here for Tibet? Well, whatever combination of academics and students led to that so there’s really quite a wide diversity for a relatively small town or small area.

Jan Paynter: So in your view, immigrants are overall positively received in our community?

Doug Ford: I think in general in Virginia they are and I would say especially so here in Virg—I mean, in Charlottesville and Albemarle. Like any place, great difference creates a certain standoffishness just because those of us that live our lives day in and day out here don’t have any appreciation for what it was like in a refugee camp in Africa or what it was like to flee the war in Afghanistan or what it’s like to live in the jungle on the Thai Burmese border and we have a very—I would argue strong but also problematic history with great difference and we have a reigned endorsements of rights in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence but yet we counted African-Americans as 3/5ths of a person and our treatment of Native Americans wasn’t that great. But I think our strength comes in our evolution and in our recognition, albeit slow by some people’s standards, of the fact that the humanity again is what counts. And it takes us a while sometimes when we’re encountered with great difference and people from a completely different culture are doing things different ways both in the family and the workplace, whatever. But it’s that individual contact when you actually get to know your neighbor and understand the efforts put in and I think Virginians and Charlottesvillians are good that way. I mean, they recognize that.

Jan Paynter: So reception is not then contingent particularly on economic situation.

Doug Ford: I think we have a class issue in the United States that—and I don’t mean to get into kind of a whole idea of political and economic class issues but the income gap has been widening in the United States over the last couple decades and I think that plays out in immigration as well. I mean, low income immigrants, it’s—many of them are undocumented but even those that are documented, there’s some suspicion or there’s some issues that are playing out in our society about income inequality or income disparity and I don’t really think immigrants are much different. I really think it’s a part of a—of an issue—of a larger issue that we have.

Jan Paynter: Of class.

Doug Ford: Yeah. And the possibilities—I mean, we’re still a very mobile society but arguably our mobility maybe isn’t as great or certainly you have to climb farther and actually immigrants often climb fast and hard and so in some ways they can do better in that issue but I really think the economic issue is kind of writ large across our society as opposed to specific to immigration.

Doug Ford: Well, I don’t know that our community presents them with specific problems or difficulties in that regard that aren’t present for most immigrants and some ways we’re probably a better—we have more resources for a smaller—for a smaller community. Obviously don’t have as many resources as a big metro area, D.C. or New York. But, I mean, we think of ourselves so much as we’re in it around home and family and family values. I mean, these are people that have been uprooted and our system—and even if they’ve chosen to become uprooted, that doesn’t mean they still don’t wish that they could have greater contact with their families, their community. You know, just what was Sunday dinner or Friday dinner back home and in Charlottesville there is probably a little bit more disconnection in that regard cause we’re not in New York City, we can’t have lots of different ethnic food supermarkets and stuff and people have to work harder for just some of the simple things that make the taste and flavor of home or their former home be accessible.

Jan Paynter: Where are some of the places people can go for support in this town?

Doug Ford: Well, IRC as I mentioned, Cresciendo Juntos is this wonderful group oriented around Latinos, it means growing together that brings together the social service agencies, school, ESL, English as a second language, adult ed, health groups, nonprofits, the faith community and while there isn’t as specific a group for the wider immigrant community—for instance, the Tibetan community has a strong support group in the university or amongst various academics and a center there. The IRC works with—there’s some other nonprofits that support immigrants and refugees. So, I mean, there are different agencies in town, all of them are cognizant of—that do the social service work and work with the low income because those are the immigrants that end up hitting the service sector. The ones who do well, have some education, get a good job, they’re off towards the middle class and not usually intersecting with the—the systems as much as some of the lower income.

Jan Paynter: Does the University Hospital and Martha Jefferson for instance have particular programs or vehicles that people can avail themselves of for help?

Doug Ford: We’ve had clients that have gotten services at Martha Jefferson although I don’t know the specific structure there. But at UVA there’s the International, and I apologize Dr. Hauck if I don’t have the name right but it’s the International Family Medicine Clinic that does a very good job with the refugees and particularly the IRC folks and other immigrants as well because they often present health issues that you wouldn’t see in central Virginia. And so that’s a specialized service that is very good for folks here. So—and then for those—and the immigrant population is like any other population, you have some of the domestic issues, abuse issues and the She Shelter, the Shelter for Help in Emergency, Sorrow, Sexual Assault Resource Agency, the Women’s Center, all those groups have very—have programs that work with the immigrant populations and we’ve worked with them because that’s one of the few ways at the Immigration Clinic that the undocumented or quasi-documented can—the kind of narrow mechanisms that exist for them to become permanent residents.

Jan Paynter: In the people that you deal with, is the current backlog on green card applications being accepted, is that something that plays in very strongly?

Doug Ford: Well, the Immigration Clinic is set up very much as kind of a pro bono public service project of the Law School so we deal with the low income and we specifically partnered with the Legal Aid Justice Center, which the legal aid movement across the country is about serving the low income. So we tend to see the people who actually don’t even have permanent residence yet or are having difficulties on their way. But the permanent residence backlog reflects, as Professor Martin was saying, the difficulty in Congress about figuring out how to do it and it’s really a question now that the last couple years the administration’s fees have gone up which can be hard but which have allowed processing to catch up. It’s a structural issue with the laws and it’s hard for the permanent residents to understand that and it’s hard for Americans who get involved with immigrants to understand that because they’re like, ‘Why do they have to be separated?’ Well, the law says we’re only going to take so many in such categories and one of the things that I think Americans don’t understand or maybe don’t acknowledge as much is that immigration is a backhanded compliment. I mean, the stran—immigrants want to come here because we’ve got a strong, dynamic society and that’s especially true arguably with undocumented immigration. These are people who are risk takers, these are people kind of fit into that idea of the American dream who want to do something different, make something more for themselves and their families and it can be hard when they kind of fit that idea and value, which is not—which is not a misconception of how we view ourselves now but they may not understand all the technicalities that go in with making those—making those systems real.

Jan Paynter: The American dream has—gets enmeshed in bureaucracy from time to time.

Doug Ford: Unfortunately, more so than we all want.

Jan Paynter: You mentioned the Legal Aid Justice Center, of which you are a part, how specifically does it serve this community of Charlottesville, what are some more areas of particular legal concern?

Doug Ford: Well, immigrants will for—I’ll give you a quick story of how the Immigration Clinic got founded is really a story of how the Legal Aid Justice Center works with immigrants. There had been a program at the Legal Aid Justice Center to get immigrant workers paid. Immigrants were coming, documented and undocumented and unfortunately there’s always—there are always the bad apples, the bad actors, the outliers and it could be even easier if immigrants felt like they didn’t understand what rights they had and legal remedies they had or if they felt like their status was in some ways in jeopardy, status meaning their ability to be here. So there is a phenomena of employers taking advantage of immigrants, not all employers but there’s some group and so they had a program to get immigrant workers paid. And they’d occasionally run into immigrant workers who could improve their status, could change their status, could get status who hadn’t done it but that’s a different type of work. And so the Immigration Clinic was very much founded to deal with those folks. And there’s housing, there’s—there’s various civil advocacy programs, and they will take immigrant clients like they will citizen clients. So if an immigrant has a housing issue, it can be just a lower income American, U.S. citizen but the immigrants are welcome as well. But that’s a specific way that the Justice Center has tried to work with the immigrant community and arguably growing immigrant community cause the demographics, they—the foreign born population in Virginia has risen significantly in the last 10 years.

Jan Paynter: Are immigrant populations here in Virginia, would you say, the targets of political opportunity? And this is a large issue, I know.

Doug Ford: Well, you say that the show is nonpartisan—I think it could be argued that there’s a certain part of the political spectrum that has felt like particularly what I will call the undocumented or the unauthorized immigrant population is both just a conceptual problem or kind of a rule of law problem, they didn’t follow all the rules but also an economic drain and that economic issue is very much disputed. Statistics that we were discussing beforehand show that immigrants contribute more than they eventually take out of our kind of system of public benefits and taxes and all and paying taxes is something they do because if you are to have a shot at permanent residence and full status, you’re got to have paid your taxes so in many ways they pay and they may not get it back. One of the issues often is people pay into Social Security and they go home. One of the discussions is how do they maybe make some of that transferrable because it pays in here and then they don’t access it. So I don’t know that—and how this plays out particularly locally is the local law enforcement, the Prince William County issue and clearly there’s a problem when immigrants come across the border, they get a—I’ve had people walk into my office and say, ‘I have papers’. Well, the paper they had was a court—basically a court summons to show up in Texas to be in an immigration court proceeding. But there was some almost affirmative misunderstanding, misdirection by themselves, by community, whatever and they say, ‘I have papers’. ‘No, you had a court date that you missed, you now have a deport order’. And where does that come from, it’s hard to know but that person in turn has probably been working and paying taxes and trying to be here and clearly the enforcement priorities is being talked about at the federal level, Professor Martin, makes some sense to me but I also think the humanity part we want to step back and most of the immigration violations it’s a civil violation, it’s not a criminal violation and potentially it could have been prosecuted for crossing the border illegally but innocent until proven guilty. And I think it’s helpful to think of what they are contributing and why they’re here, which is usually to work.

Jan Paynter: To what degree did the subprime mortgage crisis affect Hispanic immigrants?

Doug Ford: I’m not an expert on this. I have some friends who work in the legal aid field who have been doing mortgage issues and I think again the low income immigrant groups, documented and undocumented, benefited from looser terms because—I think there was a comment earlier, possibly Professor Martin or in our conversation about banking and living in cash because of difficulties establishing all the kind of financial life that we expect to be able to do, although the fact is if they take the time, many of them can get bank accounts and can do things. And so the looser standard has allowed more people to get into homes, which I think for immigrants was probably generally a benefit. But like anybody else, some of them over estimated their abilities to carry mortgages, to carry debt. But I don’t think they were particularly—I don’t think they were any more problematic than a lot of just regular Americans, especially because they save so much and send so much home. Most of them are trying to buy a house as well as supporting some extended family someplace else.

Jan Paynter: Assuming that Congress on both sides of the aisle can muster the intestinal fortitude to act and President Obama makes good his promise to address immigration concerns, what kind of progress in immigration do you envision taking place?

Doug Ford: Immigrant reform of the scope that’s been laid out a couple different times by both sides of the aisle, which includes legalization of the large majority of the undocumented and some sort of worker visa or worker program that brings in the low income or the lower wage labor that our economy appears to desire, would be a great boon to rights and to our whole immigration system because it would remove this relatively large group from a gray, arguably jeopardized position where we wouldn’t be able to call a group illegal and then argue coherently for depriving them of some of the benefits to our society. It would put us all back. And the importance of the worker visa is immigration is a backhanded compliment, our economy’s strong and yes, we can have arguments about how many immigrants we should have but we really need to talk about immigration in terms of our economy, not so much in terms of our national security. The people come because they want to work and because they believe there’s opportunity and the employment indicates even in a tough economy there is opportunity and so that’s a compliment to us that our values and our economy are as dynamic as they are and can take these folks in.

Jan Paynter: One of the things too people in this situation encounter is that they have to report their incomes and pay taxes without the privileges of a resident U.S. citizen. That’s a real difficulty for people I think. All this being said, should we as a nation and as individual communities be considering new ways to think about human rights for our citizens in waiting? Your thoughts.

Doug Ford: Well, I guess human rights is—I kind of gave in my intro to how I came to it—I think that it would be helpful for us to have a more nuanced appreciation of our own icons, our own Bill of Rights. That was only for men of property, not even for women much less African-Americans or Native Americans and I think our power and the strength of our system lies in our values less than in our military and in how those values get played out and the initiative and the energy that goes into our economy. And so I think it would be helpful to take a humanity based view towards rights even to people that may “be unauthorized, undocumented, illegal” because it has shown over time that it is our recognition of African-Americans, Native Americans and various disfavored immigrant groups, humanity, which has led us to give them the full benefits of participation in society and the fact is immigrants now that are here for any length of time, many of them are apt to be here just because that’s the history we have. We are a pretty welcoming folk, especially when we get to know them.

Jan Paynter: Welcoming a stranger into our own home and making them feel at ease, this is an American value with which most of us are very familiar. Our parents and grandparents spoke to us about it because often they understood all too well the feelings of loneliness and isolation which come with leaving familiar shores. Moving to a new country is an act of great courage and not for the faint of heart. It is worthy of respect and encouragement. When we look into the faces of our immigrant friends and neighbors, we will always, if we look carefully, find ourselves. I would like to thank Professor Ford for his insightful analysis and discussion today. Thank you at home for listening to our conversation. If you would like more information about the topic we have just discussed, you will find a number of books on immigration on our website at politicsmatters.org. There is also a complete archive of all prior Politics Matters programs which you may watch in their entirety at any time. We would like to hear from you with all questions, comments and ideas for future programs. You can email us at info@politicsmatters.org. We air Tuesday and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Thank you again and until next time, I’m Jan Paynter and this is Politics Matters.